The search for Sharbat

Her sea-green eyes captivated the world peering from a magazine cover 17
years ago. Now, she tells her story in a TV documentary. Michelle
Griffin reports.

When† photographer Steve McCurry coaxed the shy Afghan refugee girl to
pose inside her tent school, he didn't think her photograph would be any more
remarkable than any other he took that day for a National Geographic
story. It was 1985, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had been dragging on for
six years, and she was one of hundreds of thousands fleeing across the mountains
to the tent cities on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan.

McCurry was working quickly, without a translator, and had neither the time
nor the connections available to ask the child her name. It was only when he
developed the photograph that he was struck by the fierce, haunted look in the
girl's amazing green eyes, "the kind of look a child shouldn't really have", he
recalls.

According to McCurry, National Geographic's picture editor
originally didn't want to use the image - it was too disturbing. But the editor
put the Afghan girl on the cover, and within weeks it was obvious that this
would be the defining image of McCurry's career.

"Right away, we got thousands of letters from people wanting to help her,
send her money, adopt her, marry her," McCurry says. In time, the Afghan girl
would become one of the top 100 photographs in National Geographic history, the
face of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and an iconic image
reproduced in books, posters, and even, to McCurry's regret, on carpets and
tattoos.

"I've seen a man who has her as a tattoo," says McCurry. "I'm very careful
where the picture is used, very mindful that it's a picture of a refugee, an
orphan. I guess, unless I think she might feel the picture would have some
benefit, I don't allow it to be used for crass commercial reasons, selling some
products. But often it's just stolen for carpets or postcards or whatever. In a
place like Pakistan, there's no recourse to copyright."

");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

For 17 years, McCurry looked for the Afghan girl, but it seemed an impossible
challenge. How do you search for a woman in a society where no man except her
husband can see her face, and it's not permitted to ask other women?

McCurry eventually stopped going to Afghanistan, frustrated by the Taliban's
ban on photography. But when the World Trade Centre was destroyed down the road
from his Greenwich Village studio, he realised he would have to return and try
to find her.

"I literally looked out my window at the flames, and then grabbed a camera
and ran to the roof," says McCurry. "I was photographing from the roof when
they collapsed. Usually, I have to get on an aircraft and fly halfway across the
world to see this sort of (devastation), this time I just pushed a button in the
elevator and went on to my own roof. I'd been working on Afghanistan for more
than 20 years, and suddenly it had come full circle."

People started asking about the Afghan girl all over again after September
11. National Geographic suggested they make a documentary about
McCurry's search, recruiting Time magazine correspondent Rahimullah
Yusufzai to act as his translator, and forensic examiners from the FBI to test
the photographic evidence. They also sent the famous photo to John Daugman,
inventor of automatic iris recognition, a new technology that uses iris patterns
like fingerprints to determine identity.

In his many years working in Asia, McCurry was accustomed to making himself
as inconspicuous as possible. He preferred to stand back and wait until, as he
says "the soul comes through" in his portraits. When he first went to
Afghanistan in 1979, he travelled in local dress, his film sewed into the lining
of his robes. When he returned to the refugee camp of Nasir Bagh in January this
year, a full film crew followed him. Rumours swept the camp as they distributed
the photograph, hoping someone could identify the child. The Guardian reported
that people believed the crew were really from the CIA, searching for the girl
because she once taught the daughters of Osama bin Laden.

One young woman was found in the camp who could be the Afghan girl's twin,
but her eyes were brown and did not match up on the automatic iris recognition
test. Eventually, after McCurry had left Pakistan for another job, two young men
came forward, saying they had lived in the tent next to the Afghan girl and her
brother. They said she had returned to her village in Tora Bora, a remote
mountain stronghold of the Taliban, and volunteered to go and fetch her.

When they returned with the woman and her brother, the National Geographic
cameramen were not permitted to look at her, so a female producer took a digital
picture of the woman's pale green eyes.

The woman remembered the picture. She pointed to the holes in the red scarf
she had worn, burned through by a campfire earlier that day. She remembers she
was angry. She'd never been photographed before. She recognised McCurry when he
returned, although she would not look at him directly or reveal her face until
he stood behind his lens. Then she lowered the veil, and glared once again into
the camera.

Over in England, iris tests confirmed she really is The Afghan Girl.

Her name is Sharbat Gula. She is 28 or 29. Her parents were killed when their
village was bombed and she fled over the mountains with her brother and three
sisters, begging for blankets along the way. At 13, or perhaps 16, she was
married to Rahmat Gul, who works in a Peshawar bakery, as there are no jobs in
the village.

Sharbat cares for their three daughters, Robina, 13, Zahida, 3 and baby Alia.
A fourth daughter died in infancy.

She cannot read, and has never seen a magazine. She never saw the photograph
that made her face so well know around the world, until the National
Geographic team showed it to her. They ask her, has she ever felt safe.
"No, but life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and
order." Now, she says, she wants her daughters educated. "I want my daughters
to have skills. I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had
to leave."

McCurry has set up funds to see that Sharbat gets that wish, and that her
family can get the medical help they need.

National Geographic has set up the Afghan Girls Fund to develop
educational opportunities for other girls and young women in Afghanistan. "I
feel responsible for her," says McCurry. "Without being aware of it, her image
has inspired so many people, and given people strength. It's good that she's
able to benefit from it."

True stories: Search for the Afghan Girl, on ABC TV on September 19, at
10pm.